The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, by Rupert Brooke Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot, And there the shadowed waters fresh Lean up to embrace the naked flesh. Temperamentvoll German Jews Drink beer around;  and THERE the dews Are soft beneath a morn of gold. Here tulips bloom as they are told; Unkempt about those hedges blows An English unofficial rose; And there the unregulated sun Slopes down to rest when day is done, And wakes a vague unpunctual star, A slippered Hesper; and there are Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton Where das Betreten's not verboten. ειθε γενοιμην . . . would I were In Grantchester, in Grantchester!  Some, it may be, can get in touch With Nature there, or Earth, or such. And clever modern men have seen A Faun a-peeping through the green, And felt the Classics were not dead, To glimpse a Naiad's reedy head, Or hear the Goat-foot piping low: . . . But these are things I do not know.

I only know that you may lie Day long and watch the Cambridge sky, And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass, Hear the cool lapse of hours pass, Until the centuries blend and blur In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . . Still in the dawnlit waters cool His ghostly Lordship swims his pool, And tries the strokes, essays the tricks, Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx. Dan Chaucer hears his river still Chatter beneath a phantom mill. Tennyson notes, with studious eye, How Cambridge waters hurry by . . . And in that garden, black and white, Creep whispers through the grass all night; And spectral dance, before the dawn, A hundred Vicars down the lawn; Curates, long dust, will come and go On lissom, clerical, printless toe; And oft between the boughs is seen The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . . Till, at a shiver in the skies, Vanishing with Satanic cries, Leaves but a startled sleeper-out, Grey heavens, the first bird's drowsy calls, The falling house that never falls. God!

I will pack, and take a train, And get me to England once again! For England's the one land, I know, Where men with Splendid Hearts may go; And Cambridgeshire, of all England, The shire for Men who Understand; And of THAT district I prefer The lovely hamlet Grantchester. For Cambridge people rarely smile, Being urban, squat, and packed with guile; And Royston men in the far South Are black and fierce and strange of mouth; At Over they fling oaths at one, And worse than oaths at Trumpington, And Ditton girls are mean and dirty, And there's none in Harston under thirty, And folks in Shelford and those parts Have twisted lips and twisted hearts, And Barton men make Cockney rhymes, And Coton's full of nameless crimes, And things are done you'd not believe At Madingley on Christmas Eve. Strong men have run for miles and miles, When one from Cherry Hinton smiles; Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives, Rather than send them to St. Ives; Strong men have cried like babes, bydam, To hear what happened at Babraham. But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!

There's peace and holy quiet there, Great clouds along pacific skies, And men and women with straight eyes, Lithe children lovelier than a dream, A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream, And little kindly winds that creep Round twilight corners, half asleep. In Grantchester their skins are white; They bathe by day, they bathe by night; The women there do all they ought; The men observe the Rules of Thought. They love the Good; they worship Truth; They laugh uproariously in youth; (And when they get to feeling old, They up and shoot themselves, I'm told) . . . Ah God! to see the branches stir Across the moon at Grantchester! To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten Unforgettable, unforgotten River-smell, and hear the breeze Sobbing in the little trees. Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand Still guardians of that holy land? The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream, The yet unacademic stream? Is dawn a secret shy and cold Anadyomene, silver-gold? And sunset still a golden sea From Haslingfield to Madingley?

Old Vicarage, The - Grantchester Poem by Rupert Brooke - Poem Hunter Old Vicarage, The - Grantchester Poem by Rupert Brooke - Poem Hunter Old Vicarage, The - Grantchester - Poem by Rupert Brooke Autoplay next video (Cafe des Westens, Berlin, May 1912) Just now the lilac is in bloom, All before my little room; And in my flower-beds, I think, Smile the carnation and the pink; And down the borders, well I know, The poppy and the pansy blow . . . Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through, Beside the river make for you A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep Deeply above; and green and deep The stream mysterious glides beneath, Green as a dream and deep as death. -- Oh, damn! I know it! and I know How the May fields all golden show, And when the day is young and sweet, Gild gloriously the bare feet That run to bathe . . . Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot, And there the shadowed waters fresh Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.

Temperamentvoll German Jews Drink beer around; -- and THERE the dews Are soft beneath a morn of gold. Here tulips bloom as they are told; Unkempt about those hedges blows An English unofficial rose; And there the unregulated sun Slopes down to rest when day is done, And wakes a vague unpunctual star, A slippered Hesper; and there are Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton Where das Betreten's not verboten. ei'/qe genoi/mhn . . . would I were * In Grantchester, in Grantchester! -- Some, it may be, can get in touch With Nature there, or Earth, or such. And clever modern men have seen A Faun a-peeping through the green, And felt the Classics were not dead, To glimpse a Naiad's reedy head, Or hear the Goat-foot piping low: . . . But these are things I do not know. I only know that you may lie Day long and watch the Cambridge sky, And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass, Hear the cool lapse of hours pass, Until the centuries blend and blur In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . .

Still in the dawnlit waters cool His ghostly Lordship swims his pool, And tries the strokes, essays the tricks, Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx. Dan Chaucer hears his river still Chatter beneath a phantom mill. Tennyson notes, with studious eye, How Cambridge waters hurry by . . . And in that garden, black and white, Creep whispers through the grass all night; And spectral dance, before the dawn, A hundred Vicars down the lawn; Curates, long dust, will come and go On lissom, clerical, printless toe; And oft between the boughs is seen The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . . Till, at a shiver in the skies, Vanishing with Satanic cries, Leaves but a startled sleeper-out, Grey heavens, the first bird's drowsy calls, The falling house that never falls. * epsilon-iota'/-theta-epsilon gamma-epsilon-nu-omicron-iota/-mu-eta-nu G od! I will pack, and take a train, And get me to England once again!

For England's the one land, I know, Where men with Splendid Hearts may go; And Cambridgeshire, of all England, The shire for Men who Understand; And of THAT district I prefer The lovely hamlet Grantchester. For Cambridge people rarely smile, Being urban, squat, and packed with guile; And Royston men in the far South Are black and fierce and strange of mouth; At Over they fling oaths at one, And worse than oaths at Trumpington, And Ditton girls are mean and dirty, And there's none in Harston under thirty, And folks in Shelford and those parts Have twisted lips and twisted hearts, And Barton men make Cockney rhymes, And Coton's full of nameless crimes, And things are done you'd not believe At Madingley on Christmas Eve. Strong men have run for miles and miles, When one from Cherry Hinton smiles; Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives, Rather than send them to St. Ives; Strong men have cried like babes, bydam, To hear what happened at Babraham. But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!

There's peace and holy quiet there, Great clouds along pacific skies, And men and women with straight eyes, Lithe children lovelier than a dream, A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream, And little kindly winds that creep Round twilight corners, half asleep. In Grantchester their skins are white; They bathe by day, they bathe by night; The women there do all they ought; The men observe the Rules of Thought. They love the Good; they worship Truth; They laugh uproariously in youth; (And when they get to feeling old, They up and shoot themselves, I'm told) . . . Ah God! to see the branches stir Across the moon at Grantchester! To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten Unforgettable, unforgotten River-smell, and hear the breeze Sobbing in the little trees. Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand Still guardians of that holy land? The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream, The yet unacademic stream? Is dawn a secret shy and cold Anadyomene, silver-gold? And sunset still a golden sea From Haslingfield to Madingley?

And after, ere the night is born, Do hares come out about the corn? Oh, is the water sweet and cool, Gentle and brown, above the pool? And laughs the immortal river still Under the mill, under the mill? Say, is there Beauty yet to find? And Certainty? and Quiet kind? Deep meadows yet, for to forget The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea? The Old Vicarage, Grantchester Summary - eNotes.com The Old Vicarage, Grantchester Summary link Link “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” was written by Brooke while in Berlin in 1912. After initially titling the poem “Home” and then “The Sentimental Exile,” the author eventually chose the name of his occasional residence near Cambridge. One of Brooke’s most famous poems, its references can be overly obscure because of the many specific Cambridge locations and English traditions to which the poem refers. Some have seen it as sentimentally nostalgic, which it is, while others have recognized its satiric and sometimes cruel humor.

Using octosyllabics—a meter often favored by Brooke—the author writes of Grantchester and other nearby villages in what has been called a seriocomic style. It is very much a poem of “place,” the place where Brooke composed the work, Berlin, and the contrast of that German world (“Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot”) with his home in England. Yet it is more than just the longing of an exile for his home, nostalgically imagined. The landscape of Cambridgeshire is reproduced in the poem, but Brooke, the academic, populates this English world with allusions and references from history and myth. He compares the countryside to a kind of Greek Arcadia, home to nymphs and fauns, and refers to such famous literary figures as Lord Byron, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Tennyson. Homesick for England, a land “Where men with Splendid Hearts may go,” it is Grantchester, in particular, that he desires. If the poem... Bloom, Harold, ed. Poets of World War I: Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. Delany, Robert. The Neo-Pagans.

London: Macmillan, 1987. Hassall, Christopher. Rupert Brooke: A Biography. London: Faber & Faber, 1964. Jones, Nigel. Rupert Brooke: Life, Death, and Myth. London: Richard Cohen Books, 1999. Lehmann, John. Rupert Brooke: His Life and His Legend. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980. Pearsall, Robert Brainard. Rupert Brooke: The Man and the Poet. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1974. Quinn, Patrick, ed. British Poets of the Great War: Brooke, Rosenberg, Thomas, a Documentary Volume. Vol. 216 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. Ross, Robert H. The Georgian Revolt. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965. Stallworthy, Jon. Great Poets of World War I: Poetry from the Great War. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002.

Start Free Trial Start your free trial with eNotes to access more than 30,000 study guides. Get help with any book. Featured Poem: 'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester' by Rupert Brooke | The Reader Online Featured Poem: 'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester' by Rupert Brooke April 27, 2009 by Jen As you’re no doubt aware, last Thursday, as well as being St. George’s Day, was a day of literary anniversaries. One of them was the death of Rupert Brooke (1887 – 1915). So this week’s poem is ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, written in 1912 while Brooke was in Germany and thinking – with almost delirious nostalgia – of home.

Best known for the patriotic sonnet ‘The Soldier’ (“If I should die, think only this of me”), Brooke had lived at Grantchester’s Old Vicarage, Cambridgeshire, a few years earlier – and would die just a few years later, on 23rd April 1915, from an infected mosquito bite, while sailing to Gallipoli as part of the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. But his poem recalls an England, or at least some corner of it, that can never die; because it never really existed, except in the imagination. Which means we can go there whenever we like: we can “lie/Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,/And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,/Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,/Until the centuries blend and blur”… The Old Vicarage, Grantchester (Café des Westens, Berlin, May 1912) Just now the lilac is in bloom, All before my little room; And in my flower-beds, I think, Smile the carnation and the pink; And down the borders, well I know, The poppy and the pansy blow. . . Oh!

there the chestnuts, summer through, Beside the river make for you A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep Deeply above; and green and deep The stream mysterious glides beneath, Green as a dream and deep as death. — Oh, damn! I know it! and I know How the May fields all golden show, And when the day is young and sweet, Gild gloriously the bare feet That run to bathe. . .Du lieber Gott! (1) Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot, And there the shadowed waters fresh Lean up to embrace the naked flesh. Temperamentvoll (2) German Jews Drink beer around; — and there the dews Are soft beneath a morn of gold. Here tulips bloom as they are told; Unkempt about those hedges blows An English unofficial rose; And there the unregulated sun Slopes down to rest when day is done, And wakes a vague unpunctual star, A slippered Hesper; and there are Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton Where das Betreten’s not verboten. (3) eithe genoimen (4) . . . would I were In Grantchester, in Grantchester!

— Some, it may be, can get in touch With Nature there, or Earth, or such. And clever modern men have seen A Faun a-peeping through the green, And felt the Classics were not dead, To glimpse a Naiad’s reedy head, Or hear the Goat-foot piping low: . . . But these are things I do not know. I only know that you may lie Day long and watch the Cambridge sky, And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass, Hear the cool lapse of hours pass, Until the centuries blend and blur In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . Still in the dawnlit waters cool His ghostly Lordship swims his pool, And tries the strokes, essays the tricks, Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx. Dan Chaucer hears his river still Chatter beneath a phantom mill. Tennyson notes, with studious eye, How Cambridge waters hurry by . . .

And in that garden, black and white, Creep whispers through the grass all night; And spectral dance, before the dawn, A hundred Vicars down the lawn; Curates, long dust, will come and go On lissom, clerical, printless toe; And oft between the boughs is seen The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . . Till, at a shiver in the skies, Vanishing with Satanic cries, Leaves but a startled sleeper-out, Grey heavens, the first bird’s drowsy calls, The falling house that never falls. God! I will pack, and take a train, And get me to England once again! For England’s the one land, I know, Where men with Splendid Hearts may go; And Cambridgeshire, of all England, The shire for Men who Understand; And of that district I prefer The lovely hamlet Grantchester.

For Cambridge people rarely smile, Being urban, squat, and packed with guile; And Royston men in the far South Are black and fierce and strange of mouth; At Over they fling oaths at one, And worse than oaths at Trumpington, And Ditton girls are mean and dirty, And there’s none in Harston under thirty, And folks in Shelford and those parts Have twisted lips and twisted hearts, And Barton men make Cockney rhymes, And Coton’s full of nameless crimes, And things are done you’d not believe At Madingley on Christmas Eve. Strong men have run for miles and miles, When one from Cherry Hinton smiles; Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives, Rather than send them to St Ives; Strong men have cried like babes, bydam, To hear what happened at Babraham. But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester! There’s peace and holy quiet there, Great clouds along pacific skies, And men and women with straight eyes, Lithe children lovelier than a dream, A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream, And little kindly winds that creep Round twilight corners, half asleep.

In Grantchester their skins are white; They bathe by day, they bathe by night; The women there do all they ought; The men observe the Rules of Thought. They love the Good; they worship Truth; They laugh uproariously in youth; (And when they get to feeling old, They up and shoot themselves, I’m told) . . . Ah God! to see the branches stir Across the moon at Grantchester! To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten Unforgettable, unforgotten River-smell, and hear the breeze Sobbing in the little trees. Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand Still guardians of that holy land? The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream, The yet unacademic stream? Is dawn a secret shy and cold Anadyomene, silver-gold? And sunset still a golden sea From Haslingfield to Madingley? And after, ere the night is born, Do hares come out about the corn? Oh, is the water sweet and cool, Gentle and brown, above the pool? And laughs the immortal river still Under the mill, under the mill? Say, is there Beauty yet to find? And Certainty? and Quiet kind?

Deep meadows yet, for to forget The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea? Rupert Brooke, 1912 Five Rupert Brooke Poems Everyone Should Read | Interesting Literature Five Rupert Brooke Poems Everyone Should Read Posted by interestingliterature A summary of the best poems by Rupert Brooke Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) is often known as a war poet, though he died early on during the conflict and didn’t live to see the sort of combat and conditions that later poets of the First World War , such as Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg, experienced and wrote so powerfully about. He also wrote notable poems before the outbreak of the War, and was associated with the ‘Georgian’ poets who named themselves – patriotically – after King George V, who came to the British throne in 1910. Here’s our pick of Brooke’s five best poems, which we think would provide a fine introduction to his work as a whole. Click on the title of each poem to read the poem.

We’ve arranged these in ascending order, ending with what we think is Brooke’s finest poem of all. ‘ The Great Lover ‘. This poem is a favourite among many fans of love poetry, and there’s certainly plenty of love on display here – of all people and things. The world is full of lovely things: ‘footprints in the dew; / And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new; / And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass; / All these have been my loves’, the poet confides. The poem is halfway between a nature poem and a love poem – indeed, it’s a bit of both. It might otherwise be titled, ‘How do I love the whole world? let me count the ways’. ‘ The Soldier ‘. The poem, another of Brooke’s war sonnets of 1914, was read aloud during the Easter Sunday service at St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, in 1915. By this point in the War, thousands of men had been killed in action.

‘The Soldier’ struck the perfect patriotic chord for the time, suggesting that the men who had given their lives had done so for a good cause, and that they represented the best and bravest of Englishmen. Within a month of ‘The Soldier’ attaining huge public acclaim, Brooke died, aged 27, from an infected mosquito bite, aboard a French ship moored off the coast of the Greek island of Skyros. Yes, Brooke became effectively the founding member the ’27 club’ (if we can include later rock stars and musicians such as Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, who also famously died at that age, under the banner of ‘poets’). ‘ The Dead ‘. Brooke wrote a number of war sonnets shortly after the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. This is one of two war sonnets of 1914 which Brooke wrote called ‘The Dead’, and is the more famous of the two. ‘Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!’ the opening line exhorts.

Like the more famous war poem ‘The Soldier’, this poem praises the sacrifice made by soldiers who have given their lives for the cause – they have made England noble and honourable again. ‘ Heaven ‘. Heaven was much on Brooke’s mind when he ended ‘The Soldier’ with its image of ‘hearts at peace, under an English heaven’. But this earlier poem, composed in 1913 before the outbreak of the War, is altogether more playful, even satirical, than the war sonnets. ‘Heaven’ uses fish to make a comment on human piety, and specifically the reasons mankind offers for a belief in something more than one’s immediate surroundings (e.g. an afterlife – hence the title of the poem). Witty and well-constructed, ‘Heaven’ is an overlooked poem in Brooke’s oeuvre. An analysis of the poem can be found here . ‘ The Old Vicarage, Grantchester ‘.

Another poem Brooke wrote before the outbreak of WWI was also one of his best-loved: ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ romanticises a small Cambridgeshire village from the perspective of a German café – a sort of updated version of Robert Browning’s ‘Home Thoughts, from Abroad’ for a new generation. Like ‘Heaven’, it’s written in iambic tetrameter rhyming couplets, but it’s not a satire: in many ways it has more in common with Brooke’s later patriotic war poetry than it has with his earlier, lighter poems. The closing lines – ‘Stands the church clock at ten to three? / And is there honey still for tea?’ are well-known and well-loved. Like the worlds of P. G. Wodehouse (and even earlier Downton Abbey), the poem captures an idea of Englishness which belongs to the years immediately preceding the First World War, which changed everything forever. The English way of life described in the poem would be altered drastically in all sorts of ways. Brooke seems to know, from his coffee-shop in Berlin, that its days are numbered. Two years later, he would be proved right.

The best edition of Rupert Brooke’s poems is probably (in terms of the best value) The Complete Poems of Rupert Brooke . Image: Rupert Brooke in 1915 , from the 1920 edition of his Poems, Wikimedia Commons, public domain . Share this: Thanks – I’ll check out your review! I’ve heard of that book but haven’t had a chance to read it, so I’d be interested in your thoughts. Kanti Burns The Old Vicarage, Grantchester Quotes - eNotes.com The Old Vicarage, Grantchester Quotes link Link Context: The poet, in Berlin, homesick, always the eulogist of his native land, England, notices that spring has come to Germany. Noticing the flowers and the golden "May fields," he is reminded of spring in Grantchester, where "you may lie/ Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,/ And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,/ Hear the cool lapse of hours pass." The line, "An English unofficial rose," is the first line wherein the poet's attention turns firmly from the landscape before his eyes to the one spread upon his memory.

Having noticed the cultivated flowers which "bloom as they are told," his eyes fall upon a rose growing wildly in some hedges. This rose transports his mind at once to England. He reacts to his observations with lyrical tenderness: –and there the dewsAre soft beneath a morn of gold.Here tulips bloom as they are told;Unkempt about those hedges blowsAn English unofficial rose. Start Free Trial Start your free trial with eNotes to access more than 30,000 study guides. Get help with any book. Yes Rupert, there's still honey for tea... | The Independent Lifestyle Yes Rupert, there's still honey for tea... THE SUNDAY WALK Tony Kelly follows Rupert Brooke's footsteps around Grantchester, peeps into Jeffrey Archer's garden, and has Earl Grey and scones in idyllic surroundings Saturday 9 August 1997 23:02 BST Click to follow "But Grantchester! Ah, Grantchester! There's peace and holy quiet there." So wrote Rupert Brooke in 1912, in his poem "The Old Vicarage".

With hordes of day-trippers these days, peace and quiet are no longer the first words that spring to mind. But the reasons for Grantchester's popularity remain the same - a beautiful, easy walk from Cambridge, a village of thatched cottages, and one of the most charming places anywhere to have tea. Start in Trumpington Road, facing the university's botanic garden, and take the footpath which crosses the Granta (the local name for the River Cam) to reach Coe Fen. You are still in the heart of Cambridge, but cows grazing in the meadow already give the walk a rural feel. Punts glide beneath a bridge on their way to Grantchester; a second bridge leads to Lammas Field, where there is a children's play area and paddling pool. Cross Lammas Field and turn left into Grantchester Street; at the end, turn right to reach Grantchester Meadows. Now you are truly out of the city. A kissing gate leads to the start of the Grantchester Grind - a mile-long pedestrian and cycle path to the village. Instead, follow the course of the riverbank around the meadows, passing punts, picnickers, and perhaps lovers, along the way.

Soon the houses of Grantchester loom up. Rejoin the footpath as it becomes a narrow lane, passing the long, enclosed garden of the Green Man, with an outdoor bar serving drinks and snacks in summer. Continue to the end of the lane and you emerge opposite the churchyard. Rupert Brooke is buried on the Greek island of Skyros - he died in 1915 en route to Gallipoli, aged 27 - but his name is listed on the war memorial here beneath one Joseph Blogg (seriously). Look up at the clock, immortalised in his poem ("Stands the church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?"). Unless your timing is perfect, the clock is unlikely to register 2.50pm - in fact it is doubtful whether it ever stood still at that time. But there is still honey for tea, in the very place that Brooke recalled - leave the churchyard, turn right, and at the bend in the road you enter the Orchard. The tea gardens opened here in 1897 when a group of students asked the owner to serve them tea beneath the apple trees; before long it had caught on and is now a Cambridge tradition.

Brooke lodged at Orchard House in 1909 and the Orchard became the meeting-place for his Bohemian circle of friends - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, John Maynard Keynes - who came to be known as the Grantchester Group. Keynes visited Brooke at Grantchester and found him "sitting in the midst of admiring females with nothing on but an embroidered sweater"; in a letter to a girlfriend, Brooke confirmed that "I wander about barefoot and almost naked ... I live on honey, eggs and milk, prepared for me by an old lady like an apple." The First World War was to bring this idyllic lifestyle to a sudden and premature end. A century after it opened, the Orchard is more popular than ever. The queues are legendary - though even on a sunny Sunday at the end of July it only took me half an hour to get my Earl Grey and scone. Arrive early, draw up a deck chair, and you can sit under the apple trees all day over one pot of tea.

If it rains, you can retreat to the original wooden pavilion, hung with portraits of a youthful Brooke, a Hugh Grant lookalike with his flapping hair and foppish good looks. Leave through the car park and look at the house on your left - this is the Old Vicarage, where Brooke also lived. The current resident is another writer - Lord (Jeffrey) Archer, would-be Mayor of London. Peer over the wall at his collection of modern sculptures; if you are lucky you just might catch one of his celebrated garden parties. A path beside the house leads back to the river, at a delightful spot beside an old mill ("And laughs the immortal river still, under the mill, under the mill?"). It does, it does, and on the day I was there a family of swans were cackling with it. A short diversion along the road leads to a shady woodland path to Byron's Pool, whose stagnant water and concrete weir belie its romantic name. Brooke and Virginia Woolf swam naked here by moonlight, but today's free spirits are put off by a stern notice forbidding bathing within 36 metres (why 36?) of the lock.

Back at the mill, a wide track leads towards Canteloupe Farm. Take this track, turn right at the junction, left at the next farmyard and right at a crossroad of footpaths to return to the village the back way with a brief glimpse of the surrounding farmland. You emerge beside the Rupert Brooke pub. Turn left along Broadway and look for the footpath on your right, crossing a field to return to the Grantchester Grind. As you walk back to Cambridge you can just make out the spires of King's College chapel above the trees on the horizon. 8 Distance: Five miles. There is free parking on Trumpington Road on Sundays. Alternatively, it is a 10-minute walk from Cambridge station. The Orchard is open daily from 10.30am-6.30pm. Of the pubs in Grantchester, the Green Man is best for outdoor meals, the Red Lion has an excellent indoor play area, while the Rupert Brooke is best for food but less family- friendly than the others. More about: Rupert Brooke | Poetry Foundation Poetry Foundation Poet Details 1887–1915 Few writers have provoked as much excessive praise and scornful condemnation as English poet Rupert Brooke.

Handsome, charming, and talented, Brooke was a national hero even before his death in 1915 at the age of twenty-seven. His poetry, with its unabashed patriotism and graceful lyricism, was revered in a country that was yet to feel the devastating effects of two world wars. Brooke's early death only solidified his image as "a golden-haired, blue-eyed English Adonis," as Doris L. Eder notes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, and among those who lauded him after his death were writers Virginia Woolf and Henry James and British statesman Winston Churchill. In the decades after World War I, however, critics reacted against the Brooke legend by calling his verse foolishly naive and sentimental. Despite such extreme opinions, most contemporary observers agree that Brooke—though only a minor poet—occupies a secure place in English literature as a representative of the mood and character of England before World War I. Brooke's early years were typical of virtually every English boy who was a member of a well-to-do family. He attended a prestigious boarding school—Rugby, where his father was a headmaster—studied Latin and Greek, and began to write poetry.

It was taken for granted that Brooke would go on to one of the great English universities, and accordingly he entered Cambridge in 1906. During his three years at Cambridge, Brooke became a visible figure in English intellectual circles, counting among his acquaintances Virginia Woolf, writer Lytton Strachey, economist John Maynard Keynes and his brother Geoffrey (later to become Brooke's bibliographer), and poet William Butler Yeats . Brooke also continued to write poetry, although his poems from this period are, as Eder comments, "highly derivative, facile literary exercises." In The Neo-Pagans: Rupert Brooke and the Ordeal of Youth, Paul Delany gives an example of Brooke's verse from his Cambridge years. Written in 1909, "The Voice," like most of his early poetry, dwells on the themes of love and nature: "Safe in the magic of my woods / I lay, and watched the dying light / . . . The three that I loved, together grew / One, in the hour of knowing, / Night, and the woods, and you." Although his early work is thought to be of little significance, Brooke by this time was considered a serious though unaccomplished poet.

In addition, he was an increasingly conspicuous figure in literary circles—a fame fueled without doubt by his charm and good looks. Between his graduation from Cambridge in 1909 and the start of World War I in 1914, Brooke spent most of his time writing and traveling. His poetry during this period, which still emphasized the themes of love and nature, resembled that of most of the poets of his generation, including D. H. Lawrence , John Drinkwater, and Walter de la Mare. These poets came to be known as Georgian poets (named after England's king at the time); their verse reflects an idealistic preoccupation with rural, youthful motifs.

In fact, Brooke and many of his friends enjoyed spending time in the countryside, bathing nude in local streams and sleeping on the ground; such activities earned them the nickname "neo-pagans." Eder points out that "Georgian verse now seems faded and pseudopastoral, a poetry of suburbia written by city dwellers celebrating cozy weekends in flower-wreathed country cottages." At the time, though, such poetry was fashionable and respected, and the first collection of poems by these writers, Georgian Poetry, 1911-1912, was extremely successful. "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" was Brooke's contribution to Georgian Poetry, and it remains one of his most popular poems. Grantchester is a small village near Cambridge where Brooke lived for a time after 1909. Brooke, however, wrote the poem later in a cafe in Germany. The poem's nostalgia for an England far away—"And laughs the immortal river still / Under the mill, under the mill / . . .

Stands the Church clock at ten to three / And is there honey still for tea?," as quoted by Delany in The Neo-Pagans—reflects "patriotism and homesickness at their most endearing," writes Eder. After Brooke's death, Henry James wrote that the poem was "booked for immortality." Christopher Hassall, in his introduction to The Prose of Rupert Brooke, offers a perhaps more realistic analysis when he comments that "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester"—though one of Brooke's most personal and original statements—is nonetheless a "lightweight poem." "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" was written in mid-1912, one of the most turbulent periods in Brooke's life. According to Delany, Brooke had experienced a sexual crisis—confusion about homosexual impulses and frustration caused by the rejections of a woman with whom he was in love. In early 1912, these tensions culminated in a nervous breakdown. Brooke spent several months in rehabilitation, during which he was not allowed to write poetry. By summer, though, he had recovered enough to travel to Germany, a trip that marked the beginning of almost three years of constant travel.

In May of 1913, he traveled to the United States, where he spent four months before sailing to the South Pacific. Of the seven months that Brooke stayed in the Pacific, three were spent in Tahiti, where, as Delany states, he wrote "the best of his poems, and [experienced] probably the most unbroken happiness of his life." Several of the poems that Brooke wrote during this period are considered to be among his most effective, including " Tiare Tahiti " and "The Great Lover." Delany notes that the first poem's inspiration was a woman called "Taatamata," whom Brooke met and became intimate with in Tahiti. Not surprisingly, the poem is a love poem, a tribute to an exotic land and carefree love: "Hasten, hand in human hand, / Down the dark, the flowered way, / . . . And in the water's soft caress, / Wash the mind of foolishness, / Mamua, until the day." "The Great Lover" is a list "of the hundred and one everyday things that gave [the poet] joy," writes A. C.

Ward in Twentieth-Century Literature: 1901-1950. "He invested this domestic catalogue with significance and beauty, and turned the commonplace into the strangely new," praises Ward. Similarly, John Lehmann in Rupert Brooke: His Life and His Legend remarks on "the precise and vivid images with which in The Great Lover [Brooke] enumerates the concrete things that evoke his love in recollection." Despite the apparent happiness that Brooke found in Tahiti, he decided to return to England in the spring of 1914. Within a few months of his return, World War I began. Like most men of his age and class, Brooke immediately volunteered for service in the war. He joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve; the group's first destination was Antwerp, Belgium, where it stayed through the beginning of 1915. The area around Antwerp was not volatile at this time, though, and the Reserve saw no military action during its entire stay in Belgium.

The lull in fighting turned into a fruitful period for Brooke, for it was then that he produced his best-known poetry, the group of five war sonnets titled "Nineteen Fourteen." Written during late 1914, these sonnets express the hopeful idealism and enthusiasm with which Britain entered the war. In the first sonnet, "Peace," Brooke rejoices in the feeling that the war is a welcome relief to a generation for whom life had been empty and void of meaning. As quoted by Bernard Bergonzi in Heroes' Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War, Brooke wrote: "God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour, / And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, / With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, / To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, / Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary." In the second sonnet, "Safety," Brooke continues to revel in the coming of war by comparing death to a shelter that protects its refugees from the horrors of life.

The third and fourth sonnets are both titled "The Dead," but it is the second of the two that has enjoyed more popularity and more critical acclaim. In this fourth sonnet, Brooke again paints death as a positive, pristine state. For Brooke, death is like an infinite frost that "leaves a white / Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance, / A width, a shining peace, under the night," as quoted by Eder. Finally, Brooke ends the sonnet sequence with "The Soldier," his most famous and most openly patriotic poem. He imagines his own death, but rather than conveying sadness or fear at such an event, he accepts it as an opportunity to make a noble sacrifice by dying for his country. As quoted by Delany, Brooke wrote: "If I should die, think only this of me, / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England." The "Nineteen Fourteen" sonnets were immediately famous. On Easter Sunday in 1915, the dean of St.

Paul's Cathedral in London, William Ralph Inge, read aloud "The Soldier." Brooke's death three weeks later insured that his name would always be intertwined with the war sonnets, and with "The Soldier" in particular. As A. C. Ward comments, "The Soldier" "became the one poem inseparably linked with Rupert Brooke's name. It is, for all time, his epitaph—beautiful and tranquil." The events surrounding Brooke's death were a significant factor in the success of "Nineteen Fourteen." In February of 1915, Brooke had been ordered to sail to the Dardanelles—a strait between Europe and Turkey—for the Gallipoli campaign that would begin that spring. During the journey, however, Brooke contracted blood poisoning from an insect bite; he died on April 23 on a ship in the Aegean Sea and was buried in an olive grove on the Greek island of Skyros. Such a death and burial, notes Delany, fueled the myth that the handsome poet had provoked the wrath of angry, jealous gods.

"Rupert's death was first reported as caused by sunstroke," writes Delany, "and had not Phoebus Apollo, the golden-haired god of poetry, struck down Marsyas for boasting that he could sing as well as the god?" Furthermore, Brooke died in a part of the world long associated with another famous English poet, George Gordon , Lord Byron. As Delany says, "Now another Cambridge poet, who had loved to swim in Byron's Pool, had shared Byron's fate." Brooke's death was felt throughout his country; Eder states that "all England mourned the poet-soldier's death." In his tribute to Brooke for the London Times as quoted by Delany, Winston Churchill praised Brooke's "classic symmetry of mind and body." "He was all that one would wish England's noblest sons to be," added Churchill, "in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable." Since the war was still in its early stages, such sentiment could still be cherished. After the staggering number of deaths that the English incurred during the trench warfare of 1916 and 1917, however, such patriotic feeling was viewed—like Brooke's poetry—as foolish and naive.

As John Lehmann comments, "What soldier, who had experienced the meaningless horror and foulness of the Western Front stalemate in 1916 and 1917, could think of it as a place to greet 'as swimmers into cleanness leaping' or as a welcome relief 'from a world grown old and cold and weary'?" A more realistic poetry grew out of the war's latter stages and supplanted Brooke's verse as the most important literary expression of the war. Poets such as Wilfred Owen , Siegfried Sassoon , and Robert Graves captured the terror and tragedy of modern warfare; next to their poetry, Brooke's war sonnets seem "sentimental and unrealistic," notes Lehmann. For several decades after his death Brooke's poetry—though always popular—was dismissed by critics responding both to the consequences of two world wars and to the pessimistic poetry that dominated the age, of which T. S. Eliot 's The Waste Land is the prime example. But more recent critics, while admitting that Brooke's poetry lacks depth, maintain that his verse does have significance.

In Rupert Brooke: The Man and the Poet, Robert Brainard Pearsall does not deny the "slightness in mass and idea" of Brooke's work but avers that "all technical criticism droops before the fact that his verse was lyrical, charming, and companionable." Other critics, including Eder and Edward A. McCourt, argue that Brooke's poetry—especially the "Nineteen Fourteen" sequence—is important as a barometer of England between 1910 and 1915. As Eder states, "Brooke's war sonnets perfectly captured the mood of the moment." Bibliography Poems, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1911 (also see below). (Editor with Edward Marsh, and contributor) Georgian Poetry, 1911-1912 (includes The Old Vicarage, Grantchester), Poetry Bookshop, 1912. Nineteen Fourteen, and Other Poems, Doubleday, 1915 (also see below).

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (includes Poems and Nineteen Fourteen, and Other Poems), introduction by George Edward Woodberry, John Lane, 1915, edited and with a memoir by Edward Marsh, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1918, revised edition, 1942. Lithuania: A Drama in One Act, Chicago Little Theatre, 1915. Letters From America (essays first published in Westminster Gazette and New Statesman), preface by Henry James, Scribner, 1916. John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama (thesis), John Lane, 1916. The Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke, edited by Geoffrey Keynes, Faber, 1946, 2nd edition, 1970. Democracy and the Arts (nonfiction), Hart-Davis, 1946. The Prose of Rupert Brooke, edited and introduced by Christopher Hassall, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1956. The Letters of Rupert Brooke, edited by Geoffrey Keynes, Harcourt, 1968.

Rupert Brooke: A Reappraisal and Selection From His Writings, Some Hitherto Unpublished, edited by Timothy Rogers, Barnes & Noble, 1971. Four Poems of Rupert Brooke, Scolar Press (London), 1974. Letters From Rupert Brooke to His Publisher, 1911-1914, Octagon Books, 1975. Rupert Brooke in Canada, edited by Sandra Martin and Roger Hall, PMA Books (Toronto), c. 1978. Song of Love: The Letters of Rupert Brooke and Noel Olivier, 1909-1915, edited by Pippa Harris, Crown (New York, NY), 1991. The Irregular Verses of Rupert Brooke, arranged with commentary by Peter Miller, Green Branch (Lechlade, Gloucestershire), 1997. Rupert Brooke and James Strachey: The Hidden Correspondence, 1905-1915, edited by Keith Hale, Yale University Press, 1998.

Further Readings Bergonzi, Bernard, Heroes' Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War, Constable, 1965. Cheason, Denis, The Cambridgeshire of Rupert Brooke, privately printed, 1980. Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, Volume 6: Modern Writers, 1914-1945, Gale, 1991. de la Mare, Walter, Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination,Sidgwick & Jackson, 1919. Delany, Paul, The Neo-Pagans: Rupert Brooke and the Ordeal of Youth, Free Press, 1987. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 19: British Poets, 1880-1914, Gale, 1983. Hastings, Michael, The Handsomest Young Man in England: Rupert Brooke, Michael Joseph, 1967. Keynes, Geoffrey, A Bibliography of Rupert Brooke, Hart-Davis, 1959. Laskowski, William E., Rupert Brooke, Twayne (New York, NY), 1994.

Lehmann, John, Rupert Brooke: His Life and His Legend, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980. Pearsall, Robert Brainard, Rupert Brooke: The Man and the Poet, Humanities Press, 1975. Read, Mike, Forever England: The Life of Rupert Brooke, Mainstream Publishing, 1997. Rogers, Timothy, editor, Rupert Brooke: A Reappraisal and Selection from His Writings, Some Hitherto Unpublished, Barnes & Noble, 1971. Rutherford, Jonathan, Forever England: Reflections on Race, Masculinity, and Empire, Lawrence & Wishart (London), 1997. Stringer, Arthur, Red Wine of Youth: A Life of Rupert Brooke, Bobbs-Merrill, 1948. Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 2, 1979; Volume 7, 1982. World Literature Criticism, Gale, 1992. PERIODICALS New York Times Book Review, November 24, 1968.

Times Literary Supplement, August 8, 1918; July 18, 1968; November 27, 1987. Voice Literary Supplement, June, 1988. Discover this poet's context and related poetry, articles, and media. Poems by Rupert Brooke

Question: Complete the title of the poem by Rupert Brooke 'The Old Vicarage,.......'?
Answer: 'GRANTCHESTER'